Re: Ice breakers

[KHMan <keinhong@...>]

On 11/9/2012 2:15 AM, Marc Lepage wrote:
> I have four kids to teach programming. I haven't really started
> yet, but I have talked about the "boxes and stuff you put in
> boxes" analogy. The easiest way to do this is with actual boxes
> and stuff on a table (a real one, not a Lua one).

+1 for Lua on LÖVE and tinkering.

Back in the old days, the VIC-20 user guide started you on 
programming with a number of steps -- first it was the classic 
two-liner, then how to stop it, then simple input, then the user 
guide offered up a longish bouncing ball program (breakout without 
the walls) -- graphical, sorta substantial, and a kid with basic 
maths knowledge can study and tinker with it. Linus Torvalds 
probably went through the same pages of the user guide on his VIC-20.

The difficulty level was nicely tuned to the kind of kids 
Commodore was showing in their advertising. The bouncing ball 
program was not trivial to the kid, but with some effort, it can 
be understood with minimal help from adults (== a sense of 
accomplishment) and then modified (== more accomplishment).

Significantly, the user guide didn't waste any time, it gave the 
kid something that worked (and looked like Breakout's ball) that 
is slightly above his/her level. There was no need to teach any 
keyword, syntax or structure -- the kid can guess or infer much of 
the program's operation (== an important learning mechanism). 
Learning BASIC properly came later.

Of course, the Raspberry Pi people are trying to reproduce this 
kind of magic, but kids these days are hard to impress. It would 
be interesting to see the education stuff the Raspberry Pi people 
are working on.

> On Thu, Nov 8, 2012 at 1:04 PM, Tim Mensch wrote:
>
>     On 11/8/2012 10:53 AM, David Given wrote:
>     >  It's much easier to think of this as *all* values being
>     passed by
>     >  reference... it's just that numbers, like strings, are
>     immutable and
>     >  cannot be changed.
>
>     We may need a beginner to test your theory on, but I am
>     extremely skeptical.
> [snip snip]

--
Cheers,
Kein-Hong Man (esq.)
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia